ROEDELIUS, CHAPLIN & HEATH

Ambient stalwarts live from Brunel’s Goods Shed.

Twenty years on from Hans-Joachim Roedelius collaborating with Andrew Heath on Aqueous’ Meeting The Magus, the pair reconvened with Christopher Chaplin to improvise three piano and electronics pieces captured here for digital-only release. While Chaplin and Heath are relative neophytes, Roedelius is a towering figure in the field of electronic music. Across his 82 years he’s produced over 40 solo albums and worked with Dieter Moebius, Michael Rother and

Brian Eno. A prime mover of kosmische, Krautrock, synth-pop and ambient music, this co-founder of Cluster and Harmonia neither swaggers nor dazzles, yet remains a diligent maestro of sound manipulation, rebooting prevailing atmospheric conditions and gently mutating environments with confident keyboard touches. Largely unsung, Roedelius had a firm guiding hand on experimental electronic music’s tiller as it negotiated the most crucial leg from avant-garde oddity to mainstream ubiquity. Just as in the mid-70s, when he helped Neu! throttle back from revolutionary hurtle to motorik cruise and engaged Eno’s ear as he retooled pop’s future with Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, Roedelius is still producing music of the future, the only difference being that the future is now.